Trippinvignettes - Number 4

In which ‘The Quintessential Whinging Mature-Aged Tour Group Participant’ relates, with childlike melodrama, his disgust at spending too long at an idyllic natural waterhole fed by geothermal underground springs. This was the first thing he said after looking around for ten seconds, and I thought his tour guide did a very good job of not slapping him and sending him to sit in the car while everyone else enjoyed themselves.

‘We’re not going to stay here for TWO HOURS are we?’

Ojo del Agua, Isla Ometepe, Nicaragua.

Trippinvignettes - Number 1

What This Is

Continuously, we run into people that play memorable little bit-parts in the low-budget road movie that is this trip. Most of the time, I can’t take a picture of them, because that would be rude, and the reason they’re so memorable is something to do with something they’ve said, which is also difficult to photograph. Hence the need for Trippinvignettes, little incidentals that show the meaningless-but-remarkable kinds of soundbites we encounter on the Gringo Trail. Sometimes it’s something stupid someone has said, and sometimes it’s something funny, or just something plain bizarre. It'll be semi-regular, I'll put up a new one when there's nothing else happening.

Most of the quotes are word-for-word, though sometimes we’ve (Angie and I) had to paraphrase or reconstruct lengthy diatribes from memory, but I always try to keep the spirit of what was said. Most of the names featured have been changed, just in case the subject can’t appreciate the humour.

These pictures are meant to be lighthearted and fun, though if the truly stupid lend themselves to vicious treatment, that can’t be helped. Most of the players here were nice people, some of them we ended up hanging out with for a while. So if you suspect you’re part of this series, please don’t be offended…

Number 1 - The Perils of Bus Travel.

In which ‘Spencer’ advises how to avoid and deal with threatening situations on Mexican buses.

‘I was on the bus in Mexico, and I had two seats to myself, so I got out all my things- my iPod, my camera and my phone and some books and put them on the seat next to me, and then I noticed some Mexican guys looking at me and looking at my stuff, so I got all paranoid and I got my knife out, and just held it you know, like that. But it turned out they just wanted to talk to me and that's where I learnt alot of my Mexican words like extraeño.’

Lazybones Hostel swimming pool, Leon, Nicaragua.

Petrol Station Delays

While waiting for the bus in Esteli, Nicaragua

Nica Food

Breakfast is coffee, scrambled eggs with vegetables and gallo pinto (translates to 'painted rooster' or 'spotted rooster') which is red beans and rice

Nicaragua has some of the best local food we've had on the trip. It mostly revolves around beans and rice (as does everything in this part of the world), but it's actually very tasty.

This is a bocadillo, which is something like and entree or snack. This example is tostones con frijoles- squashed plantain slices (a plantain is a big banana that thinks it's a potato) which are fried, then served with cheese and a bowl of beans in sauce.

...and to drink, rum. A Nicaraguan specialty.

If you don't want rum, you can have grapefruit soft drink

Shell Art

Shell ceiling lamp

I love kitschy hotel room decoration, and the Oasis Hotel in Las Peñitas place had an oversupply.

Shell shelf friends

Las Peñitas

Las Peñitas is a small village on the beach in the North of Nicaragua. We went there looking for surf, but instead found this thumping shorebreak. When the waves are like this, you don't go swimming, you just walk in up to your knees and then run away from the waves. I am still washing the black sand from my hair.

Volcano Tumbling

Apart from inhaling sulfurous fumes, people climb Cerro Negro to come back down to sea level in what the tour companies promise to be an EXTREME (!!!) fashion. It's called volcano boarding, and involves strapping your feet to a short, snowboard-like object an then swooshing down the basalt slope of the hill. I tried it, and failed miserably at any kind of stylish descent, instead, I tumbled down most ungracefully, filling my gloves, boots and face with gravel. Angie took a toboggan and made it down in one go, but the fact that all the goggles were scratched beyond anything resembling clarity, and also the fact that it was now dark, made the experience a blind one.

The slope looked just like a regular piste, except in negative

Up

Down ...and repeat

Low-light sliding

Cerro Negro

Cerro Negro is a young volcano. It first appeared in 1850 in the middle of a cornfield, and has since grown to reach around 700 metres. It's active, and you can walk right into the smoking crater where sulfur fumes billow straight from the hot earth.

León

Angie's model is shy

Laguna de Apoyo

La Laguna from above

Inner tubes provided flotation

Laguna de Apoyo is a large mass of preternaturally clean water cupped inside the crater of a long-dormant volcano sitting beside Lago Nicaragua. Geothermic activity beneath the 200 metre-deep lake keeps the water warmed to the perfect temperature for swimming, and we spent a few of the most pleasant days of our trip kayaking, floating on and exploring the lake and it’s surrounds.

There was also lots of hammock time

Possibly a town called Diría

Transport 1

Transport 2

Old joke

Trinket Castle and the Hammock District

Market town Masaya rides on the back of all kinds of tourist knick-knacks. Apparently most of the souvenirs in Central America are made there, and there is an entire city block bordered by faux-colonial turreted walls that enclose an extensive tourist market stocking hammocks, bright clothes and pairs of dead toads taxidermically posed in compromising positions. After browsing the markets, whose best stock came from Guatemala, we spent the afternoon wandering the hammock district, a section of town filled with hammock workshops. The workshops were actually people’s homes, and the showrooms were the living rooms, which meant that while you were browsing, Grandma would be sitting there knitting trim for hammocks, the kids would be watching cartoons and the sound of the weaving machine could be heard from the spare bedroom.

Museo San Francisco

This musuem is a cute collection of random artifacts, artworks and displays housed in a building far too large.

These are papier-mache people performing a kind of game played by the indigenous people around the area of Granada. Disturbingly, they don't have faces, and they hang stiffly in a featureless beige room like Francis Bacon paintings caught in 3-D.

Little Granada from above